“‘I hope some day,’ says she, ‘that we will have that painting restored. I mean to, I am sure, when I am in a better position to have my views carried out here.’
“Of course, she didn’t mean nothin’—just showin’ off in front of me,” said Miss Titus, shaking her head and biting at a thread in her queer fashion. “But right behind us on the stairs was Peter. We didn’t know he was there.
“‘Wal,’ says he, drawlin’ in that nasty, sarcastic way he had, ‘if you wait till your views air carried out in this house, Sal Maltby, it’ll be never—you hear me! I guarantee,’ sez Peter, ‘that they’ll carry you out, feet fust, before they carry out your idees.’
“My! she turns on him like a tiger-cat. Yes, Ma’am! Sartain-sure I thought she was going to fly at him, tooth an’ toe-nail! But Peter had a temper like ice-water, an’ ice-water—nuff of it, anyway—will put out fire ev’ry time.
“He just listened to her rave, he standin’ there so cold an’ sarcastic. She told him how she was going to live longer than he did, anyway, and that in the end she’d have her way in the old Corner House in spite of him!
“When she had sort of run-down like, Peter says to her: ‘Brag’s a good dog, but Holdfast’s a better,’ sez he. ‘It ain’t people that talks gits what they want in this world. If I was you, Sal Maltby, I’d learn to hold my teeth on my tongue. It’ll git you farther.’
“And I b’lieve,” concluded Miss Titus, “that just then was the time when Sally Maltby begun to get tongue-tied. For you might’s well call her that. I know I never heard her ‘blow,’ myself, after that quarrel; and gradually she got to be just the funny, silent, grim sort o’ person she is. Fact is—an’ I admit it—Sally gives me the shivers oncet in a while.”
Tess and Dorothy did not always play in the garden, not even when the weather was fair. There must be variety to make even play appealing, although the dolls were all “at home” in the out-of-door playhouse. Dot and Tess must go visiting with their children once in a while.
They had a big room for their sleeping chamber and sometimes they came, with a selection of the dolls, and “visited” in the house. Being allowed to play in the bedroom, as long as they “tidied up” after the play was over, Tess and Dot did so.
Ruth had strictly forbidden them going to the garret to play, unless she went along. The excuse Ruth gave for this order was, that in the garret the smaller girls were too far away from the rest of the family.